K-R wrote:I'm pretty sure on some forums the anchor is actually just #unread, not a specific post, which is why I thought it might break. But obviously that wouldn't apply here, since it does anchor to a particular post.

I find that it breaks if the browser feels a need to redownload the page (e.g. if you shift-reload the page, or there's an explicit expiry in the HTTP headers that came with the HTML body) as the back-end has noted that, upon serving you the page with the 'first unread' post upon it, you have now (conceptually) now 'read' this message, and all messages up until the latest available (or page-end, should that be sooner). The next full request for "next unread in this thread" is thus served with an adjusted content (including #unread point).

But if the browser is happy to stick with the cached source (plus the by-now-locally-cached page-realligning images and other embeddeds of various kinds), it may well render again (and near instantaneously) with identical contents as you ended up with the first time, and then shift the scrolling viewport appropriately. As described.

But, as ever, depends on all those niggling little dependencies and subtly differing behaviours as to how good or bad it is at obeying various expectations...

(I still want a forum that has user-shiftable thread bookmarks. Details follow in Spoiler, due to length...

Spoiler:

Say I want to read the Time thread, as a local example, both from the beginning and at the end... The "first unread" flag starts off as "first message posted after I join the forum" (in other forum softwares it is, or can be reset to, the very first post of a thread not read at all yet, no matter that this was prior to joining) and then updates if/when I read a page of heretofore unread posts (even if that's via a link to a page far post-dating where I've actually happily read up to by 'normal' unread flagging, exacerbated by thread-numbers being hard to recognise for their actual destinations).

To read such a monumental thread I have to keep a separate tab open on a "starting at page 1" cycle (at least until I get to recognisable territory/datestamps) whilst I use the unread-tagged mechanism to 'end catch-up' in my regular forum tab. Alternatives include using the browser's own bookmarking feature (remembering to remove/overwrite old ones as I add new ones) and/or pasting the relevent thread-page URIs to a text file used for that purpose.

It'd be nice to have a secondary bookmarking feature for any purpose (including the last cycle start in a Mafia thread, for instance), with a thread-top(/side) link to update this marker, perhaps to the resolution of an exact post - rather than whole page. (If I were greedy, I'd ask for multiple markings per thread, e.g. for each post with an embedded link that I want to check out later, rather than use the In New Tab or Copying To Textfile methods that I might do now, but I realise the complications to the interface that this would cause, as opposed to a single new 'special flag' per thread.) Indications, from other pages, how far back/forward this marker exists would be useful, too. But that's just afterthought.

Secondarily to this, there's the complications that wkuld need to be added in the modification of the 'next unread' marker so that alighting on page 150 of a thread, when previously the '#unread' would have been on page 120 (for e.g.), only marks p150 as (conceptually) 'read', leaving the 'first unread' linking to still aim at p120 when called upon by normal means, rather than sending it to so-far-unseen p151. It would require a single value (message# for the first unread - or probably, logistically easiest to deal with, the last read one instead) to change to a range-defining variable. Mark p150s message#s as 'read' but keep all mesages from the original starting point to the current end-of-thread as flagged unread in some suitable manner. Would also help in merged threads, where one pre-merged thread was read to a different datestamp from the other.

Realistically, this secondary concept might mean messages might need their own read-flags, as they already appear to have, but I suspect this is just a function of the thread's own (singular, at least insofar as each individual reader is concerned) "has read up to..." value.

But to combine these concepts, maybe the 'unread/read' flag ought to be click-to-toggle, or just leave that alone and add a 'marker' flag (either a second one-per-thread-per-user, thus replacing the previous marker, or per-message-per-user for unlimited numbers of 'breakpoints') with "go to [next] marked post in this thread" linky next to the thread title. And if you land on a page beyond the original 'first unread', get the chance to not reset the '#unread' point, too. I'm sure some forum backends must already have such facilities (though I've not seen them, not as I describe anyway) but none of the half-dozen or so flavours that I've used in recent times...

...but this isn't a feature-request, just some mullings over of the issues concerned.)

While I'm here, several times since I discovered by a comment on tjis thread that egosearch has been (again?) fixed I've composed a little thing about (as far as I can tell) it apparently being A-Ok for me now. Yet I didn't want to write a mere contextless "thanks" message for the fix, and clutter the place up. Nor jinx the fix by doing so. Well, I might still have jinxed it (and I note others seeing inconsistencies, still) but a little fluff down here at the end of a longer post, where no-one will even read it, avoids the contextlessness issue, methinks. Thanks!

The title of each post is also a permalink to that post, so you can right click/long press the title and save the link to bookmarks, as a simple implementation of this functionality from the userside. I'm sure it would even be relatively straightforward to write a userscript that adds the basics in the way you describe, and you could apply it yourself on every forum you use that way.

phlip wrote:If you hit enter in the address bar, and the URL matches the page you're already on, and there's an anchor (ie, a # with something after it), then it doesn't actually reload the page, it just scrolls to that anchor. It needs to work that way because that's how links to anchors work to just scroll the page without reloading, and if theyre doing that they may as well make the address bar work the same way.

Not true in Chrome. If you just hit Enter in the address bar, it'll freshly load the page. To get the "just re-scroll to this anchor" behavior, you have to manually change the anchor, hit Enter, then change it back and hit Enter. The value in the middle doesn't have to be an existing anchor, just something other than what you originally wanted - I just add an "a" to the end or something.

The Snide Sniper wrote:Hold up, load of BBCode suggestions comin' through, most of which are from my own forum. (is this the right place?)

I don't know, perhaps one could be started, if there isn't one already, and heads wiser (and more Adminish) than mine will know if this is (or should have been) already a thing.

But two quick points of interest, to compare with elsewhere...Where I've seen it, on many forums [hr] has been monotomic with no need for the closure. This may depend on the [find]/<replace> code not requiring strict open-close pairings, though. (Are there any that go the whole hog and require [hr /], I wonder..?)Your [esc] is close, but subtly different, to the [nobbc]-surrounder tag, of widespread use. (Again, the catch'n'replace mechanism may have to be conducive to exclude all the innards from further nested catchin'n'replacin'...)

The Snide Sniper wrote:Hold up, load of BBCode suggestions comin' through, most of which are from my own forum.

Hmm...

[box], [float], [font], [hr] - Sure, I guess? Not sure I see the use-case, but I'm sure people would find one. Though, for [float] especially, I'm sure the potential for messing up the board layout by mis-nesting it is pretty severe...

[align] - given we already have [center] and [right]... this would gain, what? Justify and justify-all? Doesn't seem that necessary...[e] - What does this gain over just entering the character? Seems like the only purposes this serves are (1) entering weird characters by name instead of having to look them up to copy/paste, and (2) defeating wordfilters. For number 1, fun fact: if you know the entity name you can just type "data:text/html,&frac12;" or whatever into your address bar, you can copy/paste from that.[esc] - I wouldn't say no to this, but there are ways and means of having a tag in a post without phpBB parsing it.[anchor] - We used to have something like this (as a component of the [bibliography] tag)... turns out that people would do things like put "#unread" anchors in their signatures, and similar nonsense that messes up the forum navigation.[warn] - Red background, bold, 50% larger, thick border, surrounded by asterisks? In what world does this merely connote "warning"?[table] et al - Oh, hell no. People already mess up forum layout on occasion by misformatting quotes and spoilers and such. And now you want to add something as complicated as a table?[style] - Pfffffhahahahahano.[redact][useless] - You're right. These are useless.

Soupspoon wrote:↶But two quick points of interest, to compare with elsewhere...Where I've seen it, on many forums [hr] has been monotomic with no need for the closure. This may depend on the [find]/<replace> code not requiring strict open-close pairings, though. (Are there any that go the whole hog and require [hr /], I wonder..?)Your [esc] is close, but subtly different, to the [nobbc]-surrounder tag, of widespread use. (Again, the catch'n'replace mechanism may have to be conducive to exclude all the innards from further nested catchin'n'replacin'...)

phpBB's custom tag code is very simplistic, it's just text search/replace with the resulting HTML. So I believe a plain [hr] would work just fine (as would [hr/] if you wanted to define it that way), but a [nobbc] tag wouldn't be possible. Or, at least, that's what it was like the last time I administered a forum, which was quite a while ago.

fun fact: if you know the entity name you can just type "data:text/html,&frac12;" or whatever into your address bar, you can copy/paste from that.

I may try that. On this tablet, I'm often encountering characters I can't type. (I can do...88 unique ones, it looks like... No, 114 including uppercase.) With all the punctuation in the above available without switching from the main layout (just needs a long-press for some), I might try that sometime. I've gone to WP and cut'n'pasted the character from a list or even its own page, sometimes, but that looks easier if I can remember the name good enough to not need searching for originally..

a [nobbc] tag wouldn't be possible. Or, at least, that's what it was like the last time I administered a forum, which was quite a while ago.

As I feared, but I saw some of your own versions of nullification in the above message, so I've got a second gift from the same post, cheers!

"Post count" and the "search users posts" total are different things. Forum games and FaiD are excluded from the former, but if you click through to the search page it should show the "true" total. I see about half as many results as flicky expects.

phlip wrote:phpBB's custom tag code is very simplistic, it's just text search/replace with the resulting HTML. So I believe a plain [hr] would work just fine (as would [hr/] if you wanted to define it that way), but a [nobbc] tag wouldn't be possible. Or, at least, that's what it was like the last time I administered a forum, which was quite a while ago.

The [code] tag manages to escape bbcode inside, so if that mechanism can be copied I think a [nobbc] tag would be possible. It may be that that's specifically hardcoded into phpBB and not available for custom bbcodes, though.

I suppose the problem, in that case, is between greedy-matching accidentally spanning serial block-pairs (crossing tbe gap(s) between the intended regions) and lean-matching being misapplied to nested pairings (accidentally matching "open 1, close 2" interweaved with "open 2, close 1", to a possible confusion of result). Treating opening and closing entities as independent (swap BBCOPEN with HTMLOPEN, wherever and whenever and with whatever param-tweaks, and then BBCCLOSE with HTMLCLOSE) would let the user mess up his or her own code however he or she liked, without worrying too much, but I imagine that this can cause some forum-breaking weirdnesses/exploits for some conditions1, so simpler to work with pairings.

'Hardcoded' quotations can use more complicated greedy-matches that do inner-to-outer replacements (something s/BBCOPEN([^BBCOPEN|BBCCLOSE]*)BBCCLOSE/HTMLOPEN$1HTMLCLOSE/g-ish, I imagine, but with a few more bells and whistles, and actual nonpseudocodinous regexp patternations, naturally) whilstsoever a convertable enclosure with no unresolved inner enclosure remains, leaving all the basic formatting tags (entrusted to the lowly administrator) set to lean-matching from simplistic editable definition files as the 'least worst' way of misinterpretting any mishandled nested bolds/etc that the clumsy end-user managed to mess up.

(Sorry, not a solution, merely some abstract musings that got out of hand.)

1 I've noticed that some forum backends actively add end-quote tags, to the end of a message with mishandled quotings (e.g. quoted something that has a two-level message-stack, itself, but in editing left it with just the one close against two distinct opens. The quote-nester thus adds the missing quote, unintelligently, to avoid HTML weirdness across post-boundaries with its spans and divs that bolding/italicising does not create. Not sure if that happens here, and I don't feel like testing, but it's probably another good reason for everyone to keep their sticky-mits off of such a powerful mechanism.

Egosearch is increasingly broken as time passes - my 1 day egosearch has 1 thread, last posted in over a week ago, and last posted in by me almost 3 weeks ago, and other time periods give other sets of threads, with very few instances where one is a subset of another, and none with any threads posted in the past fortnight.

rmsgrey wrote:Egosearch is increasingly broken as time passes - my 1 day egosearch has 1 thread, last posted in over a week ago, and last posted in by me almost 3 weeks ago, and other time periods give other sets of threads, with very few instances where one is a subset of another, and none with any threads posted in the past fortnight.

For me it only ego-searches posts that were created before the Forum Migration. Everything after is not indexed, for whatever reason, so it becomes less useful over time.

Belial wrote:I am not even in the same country code as "the mood for this shit."

By most recent first, membership(s) were as follows (but already changed at the top end)...Comic 1685 - all searches but Egosearch / is post migration.Forum Migration - strangely, all searches but 1d! (Should be a member of that, definitely...)INTRO THREAD THE THIRD - all searches, no exceptionsComic 1683 - all but 1d and Egosearch... .Whut??What-If 0150 - all but EgosearchNo more 1d matches after this pointBritish EU Referendum - all relevant searchesComic 1684 - not in EgosearchWhich Planet? - (my own creation) non-ego(two adjacent Science threads - incorrectly absent from 1wk, and non-egoComic 1682 - egolessFun sudoku - newly appeared in Ego, but absent 30d or less.Comic 1673 - absent from 7d only (1671 is not, 1682 is not, surrounding this one by both Creation and Revision timestamps)xkcd Skyscraper - claims last added to 20th May, but changed today! Even so, should not be absent from 7d search, but isComic 1671 - all relevant searcheslast of the 7d matches(14 day, but not 7d range) - previously noted anomalies, plus "Supermyths" thread (News) absent from 14d(LEQ 30d, GTR 14d) - noted anomalies (one egoabsent, two different ones are 30d absentees)(90d limit reached) - WhatIf 0143 (but not adjacent 0147), Comics 1643 to 1645 (but not surrounding ones) are unlisted for 90d, yet should be6m/1y lists show everything that any other list does, and egosearch agrees faithfully by this point. I joined >3m <6m ago, so no surprises expected

Breakdown by subforums (as it seems to me that subforum settings/affinity-to-search would explain some of the things seen:

Comic-related threads from 1678 are all absent from Egosearch. Up to 1676 they are present. May be other strangenesses.

Neighbouring them, What-If 0150 absent from Egosearch, whilst 0149 incorrectly absent from 30d. Whilst 0143 is missing from 90d, 0147 is not, but the former was last added to ¾hr after the latter on 12th April as the most obvious oddity.

Science board appears to have become 'ego-absent' from at some point in early May.

Forum Games is... inconsistent. So regardless of post-count inclusion or not, it's not being logical.edit: based on misremembering another forumvs skyscraper - probably still odd, but not quite so odd after all

The only 'global'/school thread is this one, which dates from migration, obviously. Did not appear in 1d search (should have) but does appear in all others.

Obviously, I can only work with what I have searchable. I haven't tried removing my id from the search params, to increase comparisons even on sub-boards with little/no contribution by me, because the likely volume would be prohibitive without more free time than I can muster.

ETA: HTH, HAND. (i.e it just might be useful. But it could just be noise, compared to what solid data you may have already accumulated.)

I noticed a related oddity today. One of my egosearch results (which seem to go on for pages and pages and pages, so they're probably mostly working fine) shows up on the second page, even though there's new posts in it as of today. Everything else seems to be working as I would expect it to, so that one oddity is... odd.

IMO, the world started to go to hell in a handcart when people started emailing MIME Content-type "text/html", with purely decorative embedded images as horizontal rules and 'stationary*' backgrounds, and likely encouraged/enforced into top-posting reply-format by the mail program too, rather than sticking to 7-bit text (with optional UUEncoding, and the clear encouragement to sensible and sane snipping of clearly indented superfluous text and "-- "-prefixed signatures)... But if you want this place to become yet another mediaboard, I can't stop anyone.

(I occasionally pen a nice animated .gif, myself, optimised to fit within board limits for scale and filesize if it's an avatar... But I've not seen any other areas round here, yet, that cry out for regular animations. Not that I've delved into all subfolders, and I'm a newbie as far as being a poster is concerned, so consider this merely a newly-arrived old-fogey's opinion. And has anyone considered ressurecting .mng or .apng formats? All formats not already allowed will require a plugin, anyway.)

* - As in printed writing-paper, but also usually unanimated, thank the gods!

rmsgrey wrote:Egosearch is increasingly broken as time passes - my 1 day egosearch has 1 thread, last posted in over a week ago, and last posted in by me almost 3 weeks ago, and other time periods give other sets of threads, with very few instances where one is a subset of another, and none with any threads posted in the past fortnight.

It appears that the various searches reset after a time - so my base egosearch has threads up to 1686 (posted a week ago); my 1 year egosearch is currently up to date (1688 - I haven't read today's comic thread yet, let alone posted in it), while most of my other egosearches are stuck in early May.

My current guess is that the set of threads for a given search is being cached for something like 4 weeks/1 month then gets replaced next time you try that search.

I think you're right. I'd kinda like to do some tests - it'd be handy to know when a reset can be expected. I wonder what's the best way.... This not-being-able-to-look-at-the-data-without-changing-the-data thing is annoying.

Dunno whether it's still an aftershock of the migration, but I'm getting long page-loading times since a few days. Requests can take anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds to complete, whereas I'm used to loading & rendering times of less than 2 seconds.The weirdest part is that it seems to have a cooldown —a new request shortly (say within half a minute) after a previous one will still complete within a couple of seconds.

A few days ago, loading pages was really slow, and I was regularly being sent to the login page when I tried to post. Logging in resulted in the post being posted, so at least that was working, but I don't know why I was being logged out every time. But that's not happening anymore.

I am however having a worse problem. On my android tablet, I can't post at all. It gives me the following error:

This site can’t be reached

The connection was reset.Try:Reloading the pageChecking the connectionChecking the proxy and the firewallERR_CONNECTION_RESET

It can load forum pages (and xkcd comic pages) just fine, and remains logged in to forums.xkcd.com. It can also view the 'post a reply' page just fine. It just fails when I try to submit. Composing an PM works, but sending fails. Viewing the edit post page works, but submitting the edited post fails. So basically it seems that GET works but POST fails.

Meanwhile on my desktop computer (which I'm using to write this post), which is on the same home LAN, I can't access forums.xkcd.com, fora.xkcd.com, or even xkcd.com. At all. I get the same ERR_CONNECTION_RESET message (in Chromium browser in Ubuntu 14.04). But echo chamber.me (minus the space, thanks filter!) is working just fine, as I was able to log in and post using it. I suppose it ought to work on my tablet too. (Yes it does, I've checked now.)

So this is all very weird. I've got no idea why forums.xkcd.com and fora.xkcd.com would partially stop working on one device, while xkcd.com, forums.xkcd.com, and fora.xkcd.com completely fail on another machine, while echo chamber.me continues working normally.

EDIT:I switched off Chrome's 'data saver' feature on my android tablet (I believe it compresses page data via a google proxy server), and immediately I couldn't access xkcd.com, forums.xkcd.com, and fora.xkcd.com at all, just like on my desktop. Which means a) the problem's at my end and b) I can't access xkcd.com, forums.xkcd.com, and fora.xkcd.com except via proxy, and the proxy only gets around the GET restriction, not POST (which makes sense). Maybe it's a router problem? Our home router's often pretty weird.

When any Tom, Dick, or davean takes a look at my post history, they'll see (as of Tuesday 19 July 2016) that my latest post was on Monday 18 July ("Random Natterings"), but when I, personally, see my own posting history, the latest post shows as Wednesday 4 May ("Radiothread").

How come other people can see my latest post history, but I can't? (had to sockpuppet this, for Science)

Also, changing the 'sort by -> all results' to various time limits does vary the latest post, but only shows up to about June, or July 13 at the latest.

Felstaff wrote:When any Tom, Dick, or davean takes a look at my post history, they'll see (as of Tuesday 19 July 2016) that my latest post was on Monday 18 July ("Random Natterings"), but when I, personally, see my own posting history, the latest post shows as Wednesday 4 May ("Radiothread").

How come other people can see my latest post history, but I can't? (had to sockpuppet this, for Science)

...and that's still your latest post (i.e., the post I'm responding to now isn't in there).

phpBB has some sort of cache of search results (completely separate from browser caches, cache servers, etc., and therefore not affected by force-reload) which I think is not being invalidated properly—that is, once you've searched for something, it will display the same results next time that same search is performed, rather than searching again. But since you have access to different forums than some random new user (FaiD and perhaps some moderator-only forums), you searching for your own posts and someone else searching for your posts are different searches, since you searching for your own posts includes posts the new user can't see.

I just returned after a ~6 month forums hiatus. My egosearch yielded up-to-date results, but if I understand chridd's post directly above correctly, that might be caused by the fact that I didn't visit the forums for 6 months and my search result cache probably has been cleared in the meanwhile. I'll test that after submitting this post and then report the result in an edit.

Edit: this thread moved to the top of the egosearch after I posted in it, so the issue doesn't seem to apply anymore.

Is there any news on this matter since 19. July? Did the subject perhaps continue in another thread? TIA.

Jplus wrote:I just returned after a ~6 month forums hiatus. My egosearch yielded up-to-date results, but if I understand chridd's post directly above correctly, that might be caused by the fact that I didn't visit the forums for 6 months and my search result cache probably has been cleared in the meanwhile. I'll test that after submitting this post and then report the result in an edit.

Edit: this thread moved to the top of the egosearch after I posted in it, so the issue doesn't seem to apply anymore.

Is there any news on this matter since 19. July? Did the subject perhaps continue in another thread? TIA.

Mine still periodically resets - the threads included sort correctly, but new threads only get added very intermittently - every couple of months or so (long enough that I don't keep an accurate track)